Editorial to Issue 15
Welcome to our Spring Issue 15. In this editorial we welcome three new members of our team – two new Joint Editors, Dr Geoffrey Nsanja, and Maria Garcia Florenciano. We also say hello to Dr Cuie Xu who joins us a Journal Manager.
Our previous collection of work was the successful Contexts of Scholarship special issue, and I’d like here to alert readers to the fact that we now have a ‘Special Issue Proposals’ tab on our website
containing guidelines for anyone who thinks they would like to bring together scholarship on a particular theme.
Issue 15 is more humble in size than the last but not in scope, and all four submissions contribute to key aim of this journal, that of supporting and publishing scholarship by practitioners, for practitioners. In the first paper, Joanne Baumber presents us with data on the English as a Foreign Language proficiency of teachers in China and examines the implications of her findings for learners’ language development. This is followed by Marc Jones’s scholarship on English language learners’ acquisition of vowels at a Japanese university, examining different modes and timing of feedback. His discussion on the implications of his data for practitioners includes a reminder that our good practice has to operate within real teaching environments. The third piece of scholarship here is a
‘Work in Progress’ article by Angelos Bakogiannis at Teeside University UK. Angelos is leading a funded project to develop a framework for inclusive practices in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning. His paper outlines the project’s initial findings and planned future actions. Our fourth and final submission in this issue is a review by Charlie Taylor. Taylor both reviews Anderson’s 2022 article discussing the SLA nomenclature and presents his own proposal for change.
The scholarship in this issue illustrates our aim to continue developing The Language Scholar as a platform where both researchers and practitioners can critique contexts and practices in our field in a spirit of open and honest debate, publishing work that is ‘meaningful and potentially transformational’ (Ding 2024).
Jeanne Godfrey
Geoffrey Nsanja
Maria Garcia Florenciano
April 2025
Reference:
Ding, A. 2024. Thought piece Alex Ding, Scholarship and (dis)Illusio: Rereading the Language Scholar Manifesto. The Language Scholar 15 pp.7-10